Office Hours with Arthur Brooks - 3 Steps to Embracing Your Fears

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, I want to talk about something that's really been on my mind, which is safety. Almost any place you look today, we talk about the culture of safety. In a lot of schools, for example, we have these safe spaces where people don't feel like they're threatened by ideas that they find especially objectionable. The truth is that when people do really, really, really hard things, the hard part isn't bringing them happiness, but having done them because what you learn about yourself is what brings happiness and dangers like that. People who are real strivers, their big fear, their death fear, is the fear of not measuring up. What's the door that you're afraid to open? Open it up. You might just find yourself running right into a greater sense of meaning and happiness in your own life. Hey friends, welcome to office hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. This is a show about using science to lift people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love. That's my personal mission. And it might be something like your mission too if you're watching this show, especially if you've been with us for a long.

Starting point is 00:01:04 long time. In that case, thank you very much. If this is your first episode, welcome. We have a whole backlog now of shows that are like this one on different topics. I hope you'll go back and look at the library and enjoy them, as much as I've enjoyed presenting them. And as you do, please do let us know what you think. Office Hours at Arthurbrooks.com is the email so that you can feedback. Also, you can leave comments on any of the platforms where you might be watching or listening to this show. We pay attention to the comments. We learn from them. And especially when you ask us questions, we always take some questions at the end of the show. So do write in and let us know what you're thinking and what's on your mind and how we can make this better. And

Starting point is 00:01:43 especially, please recommend this to your friends. Word of mouth is incredibly important for us because people trust their friends to give them what's really best. And in a world of options, it's really up to you to give people the best that you've actually been listening to. If that includes the show, thank you. Hey, friends, a lot of you know that I keep a very high protein diet. That's important for me in my 60s because I want to maintain a good level of muscle protein synthesis, and I don't always have time to eat as much protein as I want from whole foods. That's the ideal, but it's just not manageable all the time. For that reason, I'm always looking for supplements that can actually get me where I need to go with respect to my macronutrient profile. A bunch of my friends were telling

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Starting point is 00:03:45 love that. And you can also find David Protein in stores by looking for the store locator. So enjoy. Today, I want to talk about something that's really been on my mind, which is safety. almost any place you look today, we talk about the culture of safety. In a lot of schools, for example, we have these safe spaces where people don't feel like they're threatened by ideas that they find especially objectionable. Safetyism is almost a cult among modern parents. One of the things that my friend Jonathan Haidt, who wrote The Anxious Generation, that big bestseller, he talks about his safetyism where parents have shielded their kids from anything that's even remotely dangerous. and in so doing, he argues, he's stunted their development. The idea that we need more

Starting point is 00:04:34 safety in our lives to get happier is hugely problematic, because the truth is we have kind of the, a social peanut allergy, if you were. We haven't actually exposed ourselves to enough of the allergens around us, social allergens around us such that we can build up any sort of resiliency. That's Jonathan Heights's argument. And he has the data to show that that's really true. So there's a couple of options here. If you agree that maybe there's too much safety in our culture and maybe a little too much safety in your life, you can just kind of let things happen the way that they do, or here's another option. Maybe you can expose yourself to a little danger, the right kind and the right dose. And if you do, a little danger might help you. Well, that's my argument today.

Starting point is 00:05:23 I'm going to show you the best science that shows that maybe what you're looking for in your life, if you're not as happy as you'd like to be, is that you need something that's a little dangerous, a little bit more risky, something that you can do to give your life, I don't know, a little more spice, maybe make you a little bit afraid. I'm going to try to make the case.

Starting point is 00:05:43 If I do my job, you'll believe by the end of this episode that danger in the right dose can really be your friend. And I'll set you in search of the danger that your life actually needs so that you can get happier. I was thinking about, you know, how I wanted to introduce this topic. And, you know, an idea kept coming to me. It's funny, in literature, there's a group of English writers, English and American writers, that are weirdly obsessed with the country of Spain.

Starting point is 00:06:11 If you look at George Orwell, he writes constantly about Spain. Hemingway, obviously, Ernest Hemingway, was writing constantly about Spain. James Missioner wrote a great book called Eberia. And for all of these writers in sort of the Anglosphere, Spain has kind of a wild quality to it, a kind of untamed quality to it. I always love those writers. And I wound up, well, not being one of those writers, I don't write novels about Spain. I went one better.

Starting point is 00:06:39 Hey, none of those guys actually married a Spaniard. I'm married a Spaniard. I moved to Spain. That's how obsessed that I actually was. And when I read, for example, Hemingway, it really speaks to me in a kind of a primordial way. I mean, there's so many things that you all know. For example, I mean, you've heard, you all heard the expression, you know, in one of Hemingway's great novels, The Sun also rises from 1926.

Starting point is 00:07:02 There's a character named Mike Campbell, who's a drunk, and he's bankrupt. And they ask him, how do you go bankrupt? And he says, well, little by little, and then all at once. That's kind of a famous expression on how things happen, right? Well, in the same book, actually, there's another character named Bill Gorton, who is, once again, another hard-drinking veteran, which Hemingway writes about because he was a drunk, too. He's talking about the running of the bulls in Pamplona. And you probably heard of this tradition.

Starting point is 00:07:31 In Pamplona, which is northern Spain, this is the capital of the Navarre region of Spain, which is some people consider it to be part of the Basque country. Every year on San Fermin, which is the 4th of July, you know, in early July, it's a multi-day festival. they celebrate it by letting a bunch of bowls like run through the city. They let them go and there's like a thousand pound bulls running through the city. And there are all these young men dressed in white with red handkerchiefs around the next. They're called mothos. And they're running in front of the bowls.

Starting point is 00:08:02 And it's just crazy. You've probably seen it in, you know, different movies and et cetera. It was made famous because Hemingway and the Sun also rises, writes about that. is this uniquely dangerous and scary and thrilling Spanish custom. I've spent time in Pamplona. It's a wild place. I've actually never done the running of the bulls. It's never interested me that much.

Starting point is 00:08:25 But I actually have gone to the bullfights in Spain a lot. When I lived in Barcelona and when I've been visiting in Seville in different places, it's controversial because obviously what's happening with this animal, but it's incredible at the same time. It is wild. how this actually happens. Why do people engage in that? And the reason is because there's something about it that affects the brain, about that little bit of danger, that kind of controlled danger, but real danger, not nonsense, like roller coasters or haunted houses at Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving.

Starting point is 00:09:01 You don't go to haunted houses on Thanksgiving? Weird. Haunted houses on Halloween. It's something that's a real danger, but in kind of a controlled way. that makes people intensely happy. Hmm. What's going on? I've talked to people who've done this Hemingway kind of thing. You know, they've run with the bulls. And it says it increases their courage, it shows them what they're actually made of.

Starting point is 00:09:26 And that's why they do it. And that's why it's actually a thrill. Well, here's what I want to suggest to you today. Find your bowls. Now, maybe you're gonna go to Pamplona and run with the bulls and son, for me. Probably not. Maybe for you, it's something a lot that seems a lot tamer,

Starting point is 00:09:44 but it's something that you've always wanted to do, but always been a little afraid of. Maybe it's learning to drive a Vespa. Maybe it's going to somebody and saying, you know what? I want you to know I've always been in love with you. Derry? Yeah. Maybe it's giving a speech in public.

Starting point is 00:09:59 You know, there are pretty famous surveys. I don't know if I believe them or not, but close enough to the truth, that some people are more afraid of public speaking than they are of their own death. there's a running of the bowls in your life that maybe it's time for you to grab onto so that you can be a modern day Hemingway.

Starting point is 00:10:19 Well, I'm not going to ask you to actually become Hemingway for reasons it'll be apparent in a second, but to become the best version of yourself. And what I want to talk about is why this actually can help you so much and free you from so many other things in your life that are not the Bulls in your life. The people who run with the Bulls,

Starting point is 00:10:36 they always come home from Pamplona, and they say my life was never the same. And I don't actually know why. Well, I know why. So stay tuned. There's been a bunch of research on this, of course. I'm going to be referring to there's a pretty interesting article in the psychology of sport and exercise from 2012. Kind of an old article now, but it's a good article called Multiple Motives for Participating in Adventure Sports, which actually goes to people who do extreme sports.

Starting point is 00:10:58 The practitioners of dangerous sports like hang gliding and whitewater kayaking, pretty dangerous. I mean, look, this is not risking your life every single day, but dangerous enough. people do get hurt and die sometimes, and ask them why they do it, and then the benefit that they get. Now, the motives are typically fivefold. Number one is that the number one motive they say is, I want to feel that excitement. I want to feel something out of the ordinary. The second is I want to achieve a particular goal. I want to get good at that thing and have always wanted to do it.

Starting point is 00:11:29 Number three is I want to strengthen friendships because typically you do the stuff with other people. You don't go, you know, parachuting into a sinkhole someplace, and, say, nobody knows I'm here. I mean, that would be a foolish thing to do, of course. You do stuff like that with friends. The fourth reason is they want to test their personal abilities. What am I capable of? And last but not least, they want to overcome fear. Those are great motives and those are stated, tangible motives. But here's the thing. All that's true. And they do achieve that. But the big benefit that they get is actually not on the list of the motives for undertaking a dangerous thing. The benefit that they get is actually beyond words and people can't quite describe it. Now,

Starting point is 00:12:10 if you've been following my work, you know actually probably what's going on here, which is to say that you're coming up with motives and you're articulating them using the left hemisphere of your brain as a kind of a complicated problem of something you want to achieve in life. And the experience that you have is in the right hemisphere of your brain, which is mysterious and meaningful and beyond words. In other words, it's ineffable. I want to do one, two, three, four, and five. What I got was this thing that I can't quite put words to, which is sort of amazing when you think about it. And that's what actually happens to people. As a matter of fact, what people who are engaging in slightly dangerous things in extreme

Starting point is 00:12:45 sports find is that they achieve what psychologists call a flow state where hours can feel like minutes, where time doesn't have meaning. That comes from, I mentioned before on the show, that comes from the work of Michai Chiksen Michai, who taught for many years at the University of Chicago and later at Claremont Graduate University. One of the great social psychologists of his generation, he wrote a famous book called Flo about how we lose track of time when our brain works in a particular way and we're completely engaged in something that's hard but not impossible. It's just at the edge of what we can actually do and we're exploring the boundary of our possibilities. And probably you've probably experienced this,

Starting point is 00:13:29 but dangerous things they tend to actually bring this on. Now, one caveat. to all this. Taking risks is not always evidence that you're exposing yourself to a little danger in search of increasing your happiness. It might be evidence that there's something wrong with you. And this is a distinction between bravery and recklessness. So let me talk about this a little bit, because there actually is a whole bunch of literature on what we call high sensations seeking people. And of course, neuroscientists have taken a real interest in this. What's different about their limbic system, what's different about their brains? And the answer is they tend to have what's called low amygdala reactivity. The amygdala is a bilateral organ. Amygdala is the word for almond

Starting point is 00:14:13 in Latin. And that's because it's an almond-shaped thing, like the ends of your fingers on either side of your brain is bilateral. And the two sides do slightly different things, but that's not very important here. What they do is it mediates the experience of fear and anger, you know, fight or flight as a result of that. And so when you're doing something dangerous, you're stimulating your amygdala. So there's a whole class of people, and this is probably mostly genetic, that have low amygdala reactivity. It's hard for the amygdala to turn on, and to feel kind of normal, they have to stimulate, they've got to kick their amygdala. Now, by the way, people who are really super fearful and really risk-averse, their amygdala's work too well.

Starting point is 00:14:55 They have high amygdala reactivity. So either way is actually something different for the norm. but low amygdala reactivity people, they're high sensation seekers. They're always trying to find some way to feel completely alive. And they don't know that they're actually trying to stimulate their limbic system, but in point of fact, they are. They tend to exhibit blunted stress and starboard responses. They always underestimate the likelihood of bad outcomes is actually what you find in the experiments. I'll be fine, they say.

Starting point is 00:15:21 And so, you know, the Darwin Awards that you see on TV of people doing these unbelievably stupid things and, you know, getting hurt or really and killed. Those are almost certainly people that have this, their high sensation seekers with low amygdala activity. Interesting paper on this in the journal Neuro Image. I'll put that in the show notes as always. And these are the people that you see in ordinary life too. You go to Yellowstone Park and there's going to be some idiot who's trying to get a selfie with a bear. It's like, don't do that with your baby. I was like, me and my baby. We're going to get a picture of ourselves with a bear. And, you know, there's always some sad story that actually comes around. But even more

Starting point is 00:16:00 commonly, that's the kid you went to high school with who is always binge drinking, you know, taking personal risks all the time. That's the kind of behavior that we see with sensation seeking, and it's a pathology. It's not, it's not somebody who's just living on the edge, man, and that's not the kind of person that you want to be. That's not normal. That's not what we want. We want bravery in the face of ordinary fear, not recklessness, which is. is to say not feeling fear. Fearlessness, by the way, isn't great. There's a whole literature on fearlessness. People, there's an expression to be a fearless leader. I want a fearless leader. No, you don't. If you actually have low amygdala active and you become a leader, you're going to get

Starting point is 00:16:41 people killed if you're in the military, for example. Never follow a fearless leader. Follow a courageous leader. More on that here at a second. Okay, so what do we want? We want people who feel fear ordinarily, and this is what we want to find our bulls. to find our running of the bowls in Pamplona, our own version of this. These are brave people and not reckless people. These are people who feel fear in an ordinary way, but they learn how to stand up to it and as such to overcome it, which in and of itself is this incredible challenge that tends to be really, really life-changing. This is the key, is to work to overcome that and not to be reckless, not to do something

Starting point is 00:17:21 just because I got to do something more and more and more dangerous to actually feel something. Hemingway himself, by the way, is an example of a reckless, not a brave person. His life was filled with these particular experiences, which in a way, which is why running in the bowls while it thrilled me, and subsequent works by Hemingway, like death on a Sunday afternoon, which is a magisterial text on bullfightings. That's how I learned all of these details on bullfighting myself as an American was reading that particular book. But he himself is a bad example of this.

Starting point is 00:17:52 I mean, he was doing all kinds of stupid things. things, risk-seeking, self-destructive history of dangerous binge drinking. And in point of fact, his life ended sadly because he was a pathologically unbalanced person with a whole lot of mental illness. That's not what we're talking about. Now, when I'm talking about the benefits that come from a healthy relationship with introducing more danger in your life, I'm really making the case that danger can bring you happiness. So what's that all about? And it's interesting because what you find is when people are doing actually dangerous things, they're not happier while they're doing them. They're happier having done them.

Starting point is 00:18:36 It's what it comes down to. So it's kind of like for me, it's like with writers, they're always happy having written books, not happy while. Actually, I like writing books is what it comes down to. But the truth is that when people do really, really, really hard things, the hard part isn't bringing them happiness, but having done them because what you learn about yourself is what brings happiness and dangers like that. doing something dangerous is something you're happy about later, but much happier about. The thrills come from taking a risk, from finding your resiliency, figuring out who you actually are. That's why doing something about dangerous can enhance your courage and raise your happiness along the way.

Starting point is 00:19:15 Okay, that's the science. That's the background. But what you really want to know is how to do that. How can you do that in your life? what's the kind of danger that you can find? And here's a few ways to actually do just that. I want to give you three ideas on how to go find your Pamplona, to find your running of the bowls. Now, to begin with, it should be something that really is kind of scary to you.

Starting point is 00:19:42 I've done some things that are technically scary. I've skydived, skydove. I've jumped out of a plane with a parachute. On my daughter's 18th birthday, all she wanted, was to jump out of an airplane with her dad. Isn't that cool? Yeah. And sure enough, we went to, we went skydiving.

Starting point is 00:19:59 That scarier than the jumping out of the plane was actually the pilot. You know, he's looking, he's like, thunderstorms, really dangerous. Yeah, we ought to be okay now. And we went up in this Cessna from approximately 1951 that had, you know, screws that were coming out of the floor of the plane. That was a lot more dangerous than jumping out of the plane, I think. But the bottom line is the skydiving wasn't actually scary to me. I don't think that my pulse even went up.

Starting point is 00:20:28 That's not scary. That might sound like an idiotic decision to you, and it did to my wife. By the way, I say, honey, you want to come with us, go skydiving? She said, that's stupid. It's just a stupid, dangerous thing to do. Maybe she's right. But that didn't bother me. And lots of things like that don't actually bother me.

Starting point is 00:20:43 Things that are objectively physically dangerous don't bother me at all. So that wouldn't be my running in the bowls. and that might not be you're running of the bulls. A lot of it for you requires thinking carefully about what takes courage. What you could do and that would actually take courage.

Starting point is 00:21:03 Now, it doesn't have to be existentially dangerous. It just has to feel dangerous to you because of what you're risking. For a lot of people, that's not a physical challenge at all. It's social or it's emotional, which is why I gave you the example at the beginning of the podcast that maybe you should go tell somebody

Starting point is 00:21:19 that you're in love with, that you're in love with that person and accept the consequences of that person's reaction. Maybe you get a, hey, I've been in love with you too and you live happily ever after. Maybe you get rejected. But the whole point is you're not going to die and you'll get a little thrill from having broken through with doing something that's really scary, if that's scary to you. Maybe it's getting serious about a job change that you need to make. And for some people making a job change is super scary. You know, that would have been just completely terrifying for my dad. He had more or less the same job for four decades and he wanted to change, but that was just really scary. He was a very conscientious person, too, I have to say. Maybe it's going back to school after a

Starting point is 00:22:02 long time. You don't know how it's going to go. I talk to people all the time who later in life they actually go back to get their college degree or they go back to graduate school and they're terrified, you know, am I up to it? For example, maybe that's leaving a city. where you've lived your whole life. Those are social and emotional challenges that can be way scarier than running with the bowls or skydiving. So that's number one.

Starting point is 00:22:28 Do the work and figure out what you're running the bowls actually is. Two, envision yourself as brave, but not reckless. You know the distinction. I told you about the amygdala activity distinction between the two. Envision bravery. Imagine yourself being courageous, not fearless.

Starting point is 00:22:47 In other words, feeling the fear and acting anyway. That's what you want to visualize yourself doing. Doing that thing where you're saying, yeah, super scary. I'm doing it anyway. That has a lot of merit to it. Just that will actually kind of fire you up. Then, of course, the question is, how do you conquer your fear? And the way that you conquer your fear is, in no small part,

Starting point is 00:23:09 by exposing yourself to that fear through visualization. there is a whole literature about death visualization. There's a whole set of techniques in Theravada Buddhism. Theravada Buddhism, which is practiced in the sort of the southern tier of Asia across Vietnam and Myanmar and Thailand, Sri Lanka. Theravada Buddhist monks, they conquer any fear of their own death by looking at photos of cadavers in various states to decay. And they look at each one and say, that is me.

Starting point is 00:23:41 That is me. exposing themselves to the truth, the reality, the inescapable reality of their own deaths, and only in that exposure can they be truly free. Well, that's the same thing. If there's something that danger that you actually need to spice up your life, no to make your life better, then expose yourself to it cognitively. That really works, as a matter of fact. Envision yourself doing something that scares you, how you're going to feel about it when you actually take that risk. How are you going to feel about yourself having taken that risk? Think clearly. reason. Don't just use your amygdala to feel something. Use your prefrontal cortex to reason it through.

Starting point is 00:24:20 Now, you might find at this stage that the odds of failure are so high and the consequences are so dire that this was recklessness and not bravery. Making the right choice is a question of prudential judgment. Usually, however, when you visualize that white whale, that group of six bowls running toward you, you're going to understand what the odds of catastrophe really are and whether or not the problem was actually inside your own head and the kind of person that you want to be, the happier person that you want to be. So that's part two is visualization. Number three is making a plan and actually following it, making a strategic plan for actually doing that. I don't recommend if he was like, I want to drive a Harley Davidson at 120 miles an hour,

Starting point is 00:25:05 but I don't know how to drive a motorcycle. So I'm just going to go out and buy one and hey, good luck. everybody. No, you don't do that. That's stupid. You prepare for it. I've talked to people about doing things that they found physically daunting. I've walked the Camino de Santiago across northern Spain, this very, very famous spiritual pilgrimage. I've done it twice, as a matter of fact. And some people find that really daunting because, you know, they're not physically in good shape, for example. They don't think they can actually walk for hundreds of miles. And I give them plans on actually how to do it. You know, I talk to them about, you know, reading about the commino and and where they're going to stay and making sure you've got months and months and months of actually

Starting point is 00:25:47 walking longer and longer distances and getting to the point where it's possible. It might still be scary, but it's actually possible. Do the work, in other words, because going in unprepared is a reckless thing to do. It's not a brave thing to do. And also, by the way, when you form a plan of something, it allows you to savor the experience before you actually have the experience. And doing that, boy, oh boy, that's really great because what you do is you extend it. That's the reason people like to think about Christmas from, apparently, from Halloween on. Because they like it because they like Christmas. And they like the Christmas carols all that time.

Starting point is 00:26:22 They don't just start listening to Christmas carols at Christmas Eve. They like to back it up a couple of months. Maybe you don't. Maybe that annoys you. But that's why people actually do it. So these are the three things to think about. So I want you. Here's your homework assignment.

Starting point is 00:26:35 What's your running of the Bulls? do the work thinking about that. Second, envision yourself actually doing that thing. And third, make a plan to actually do it. And when you do, I promise you, if it's bravery, not recklessness, your life's going to improve. And that might be, not more safety, but more danger, might be just what you need. Now, let me tell you what mine actually is. You know what it is not. It's not skydiving. That is a net. And, and, and, and, And going to the bullfights is interesting. And at one point, I was at a bull fight, and a bull jumped the barrier into the seats.

Starting point is 00:27:14 One row ahead of me. I was closer to that bull than I am to this camera right now. That wasn't it either. It wasn't it. Maybe I've got a defective amygdala. I don't know. But I'll tell you what it is. It's failure.

Starting point is 00:27:29 I'm frightened of failure. I'm terrorized by the idea of failure. I mean, and a lot of you are too. If you're watching this podcast, you're probably a striver. The reason you're watching this podcast is because you want to be better at what you do. You want to be a higher performer at what you do. My students, too. And the result of it is that people who are real strivers, their big fear, their death fear,

Starting point is 00:27:55 is the fear of not measuring up to their own standards, the standards of people who actually believe in them. And I've always been that way. And the result of that is that it's kind of held me. back until I figured out that I need to face it regularly. Here's why I started doing it in my early 30s. Now, early on, if you follow my work, you know that I was a professional classical musician. That's how I wound up in Spain, was playing the Barcelona Symphony, as a matter of fact. I was afraid of failing, but I wasn't even enjoying my life. And so I needed to do something differently. And so I quit. I walked away from the thing I'd been doing since I was eight years old. When I was 31, I walked

Starting point is 00:28:35 away from it. I literally didn't know how to do anything else. I had no skills, nothing. And I walked away and I took my career all the way down to the studs and I went back to school. I had just gotten a bachelor's degree by correspondence and economics of all things, because maybe that would be really interesting, which it was. And I enrolled in and started a PhD program to become a behavioral scientist. Maybe that would work. Now, what that was was the scariest thing I'd ever done, because that was confronting my fear of failure by taking my beloved career apart, which wasn't beloved work. It was a beloved career because it was very ego-driven, as a matter of fact.

Starting point is 00:29:15 And I confronted my professional failure. And in so doing, I felt truly alive for the first time in a long time, as a matter of fact. And I learned something from that, which is I need to do that regularly. So I came out of my PhD and I became a professor. I was most of that time at Syracuse, as a matter of fact. And it went super well. I published a lot of stuff. I was doing the traditional academic stuff.

Starting point is 00:29:35 But by the end of 10 years, I'm like, yep, time to do it again. So I quit. I walked away again. And I took a job working for a nonprofit organization. And that was just terrifying because I'd never done anything like that. I had to raise $50 million a year and I'd never raised a dollar. I had hundreds of employees. I'd never had an employee.

Starting point is 00:29:53 By the way, that was a crazy decision on the part of the board of that organization to hire somebody with no experience. And it was scary. And in the first couple of years were really, really scary. But it did the trick. It did the trick. And the end of that period, the end of another decade, you're starting to see a pattern here probably. It was time to get scared again.

Starting point is 00:30:12 So I walked away from that. And I walked to doing what I'm doing now. But you know what? It took a couple of years before I knew what I was doing. It took a couple of years before I felt competent at all. I felt for the first couple of years after I left my CEO job and I came back to academia, but more importantly, where I had this big, new field of the science of happiness, like a complete patsy, a total hack, complete fake.

Starting point is 00:30:36 And that's how I found my sense of being alive was by confronting that particular failure every day. Now, of course, it's really a lot easier because, you know, my beloved wife, Esther is always has my back. Like, I don't care if you fail. I don't care if you fail professionally. You're my husband. I love you.

Starting point is 00:30:54 And that really, really helps an awful lot. But let me tell you, when I take my career under the studs, which I do over 10 years, I confront that failure. I feel like I'm running with the bulls. And that's a real source of the life in my life. What's the door that you're afraid to open? Open it up. Let the six bulls out.

Starting point is 00:31:14 Give it a good run. You might just find yourself running right into a greater sense of meaning and happiness in your own life. Let's take some questions before we finish. First one, this is an anonymous question that came into info at our Arthur Brooks.com. I love the work I do, but I continue to dread going to work and come home feeling drained. How do you know when it's time to leave a job? How do you know when it's time to leave a job? Now, this is really common. I was just talking about my career. That has had all these different

Starting point is 00:31:47 turns and twists and at the end of 10 years, I always love my work, but I'm dreading going to work. This is really, really common. Let me give you a little rubric. I've mentioned it briefly in the show before. not just for how to know when it's time to leave, but to know whether to take a job or not. The job that's right for you that serving your mission has three gut feelings involved in it. Excitment about the job or career or both. Fear and deadness. Deadness means you feel empty inside. That deadness is, by the way, anonymous while you dread going to work.

Starting point is 00:32:25 There's lots of deadness in that. Those are the three sensations. Now, this is not just about jobs. Maybe this is when you get a marriage proposal or an opportunity to move to Sacramento, whatever it happens to be. You have an opportunity for something new. You feel those three, and I want you to examine those three things. I'm talking about deciding to do something, but this is also about deciding to leave something.

Starting point is 00:32:48 The right levels for taking something or keeping something is 80% excitement, 20% fear, and zero percent deadness. If you can manage zero percent deadness, sometimes that's not in your opportunity set. You are feeling too much deadness, and it's time to go. That's what it comes down to. My guess is there's no fear in it anymore. There's a little bit of excitement, but there's a lot of deadness. The ratio is all wrong.

Starting point is 00:33:11 Remember, 80, 20, zero. That's what you're looking for. If you're going to take something or if you're going to stay something, you're going to deviate too much from that. Either don't take it or stop doing it if you're already doing it. Another anonymous note comes in over the website as well. Can you suggest any information on preparing for the death of a family member? This is really a tough one.

Starting point is 00:33:33 And this can be harder than preparing for your own death. It really can be. But the classical techniques for doing that, once again, are kind of what I talked about the show today, which is exposure to the idea. Now, I told you about the Buddhist monks who practiced the Marin As Sati meditation. That's actually literally a nine-part meditation on the various stages of death, having died you know, the decomposition of the body, all the way to, you know, bear bleached bones that are turning into dust. It's this contemplation of non-not-existing physically in the form that we have before,

Starting point is 00:34:09 which is a physical reality. It's an inevitability to be sure. This will cure you of your own fear of death. It will. But maybe you have to do that for the people that you love as well, for the inevitability of them dying, it's not going to help you to avoid the idea. Because the people that you love are going to die. And so it's not a great strategy to say, yeah, I know the people I love are going to die, but, you know, I'm counting on going first, so I don't have to confront it. That's a terrible strategy in life. The truth of the matter is that people that you love are going to die. And you have a responsibility to be strong to yourself and to other people. The only way you can do that is by confronting that particular fear. This is another kind of running.

Starting point is 00:34:50 of the bowls. Maybe that's your running the bulls. As a matter of fact. Last question. Once again, lots of anonymous questions today. How come nobody wants to give their names? How can I give advice to a person without offending them and without feeling like I'm superior? That's people. I get this an awful lot. So, you know, when I'm lecturing, for example, people say, how do I teach this stuff to my teenage kids? This is the least receptive audience in history is your teenage children, if you're the parents, right? I mean, they'll take advice. from, you know, a rando on the street, but not from you when they're 16 or 17 years old. But your results may vary.

Starting point is 00:35:27 Depends on the kid. But you get my point. And the way to do this is what we call the appeal to authority. The way to do this is when you're trying to give people advice, you say, you know what? I dealt with something like you're going through right now, and it was really confusing to me. And I read this book or I saw this video or somebody gave me this piece of advice. It might be helpful to you.

Starting point is 00:35:46 I don't know. It helped me. And what you're doing is you're deflecting it. You're appealing to an outside authority. You're not wagging your finger. You're also not taking credit. You're exposing the fact that you've struggled with something. And you have, by the way.

Starting point is 00:36:01 I mean, you have something similar, if not the same problem that somebody's having. And then you solved it, I hope. And if you did, think back to actually what was actually helpful to you and recommend that. Recommend something else as opposed to originating the idea yourself. Another way to do this, by the way, is to say, you know, I read this book and I don't know what I think about it. Would you read some of this and tell me your views? Boy, that really helps a lot, as a matter of fact, because that gets a conversation going

Starting point is 00:36:27 and people can decide for themselves whether it's helpful. And I hope this is helpful. In general, I hope the whole show is helpful to you today. If you need a little bit of danger in your life, let me know your thoughts at office hours at arthurbrooks.com. As always, please like, please subscribe, look for this show again and again on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple, any place where you actually get your fine podcast content.

Starting point is 00:36:50 leave a comment or read it. Follow me on all of the social media platforms, Instagram, LinkedIn in particular, and all the others as well. And order the meaning of your life. The book right behind me here, all the things that I'm talking about here, you'll find more of that in the book

Starting point is 00:37:03 and all the things that I write. One more thing, by the way, if you want to see my work every single week, I write twice a week in the free press, thefp.com. I have a column on Mondays. I have a newsletter on Fridays. The newsletter is completely free.

Starting point is 00:37:17 So you can get a lot of this particular content if you like it in written form. But if you do, do me a favor. Take credit for it. Take some of the ideas and share them with somebody else. Because as soon as they go from my mouth to your head, they're all yours. And I need people with me and the happiness movement. I need fellow happiness teachers.

Starting point is 00:37:35 So thanks in advance. See you next week.

Office Hours with Arthur Brooks - 3 Steps to Embracing Your Fears

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